this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
830 points (98.5% liked)

Technology

59596 readers
2931 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
L3s
[email protected]
[email protected]
L4s
enu
830
CrowdStrike downtime apparently caused by update that replaced a file with 42kb of zeroes (twiiit.com)
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/technology
190 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

…according to a Twitter post by the Chief Informational Security Officer of Grand Canyon Education.

So, does anyone else find it odd that the file that caused everything CrowdStrike to freak out, C-00000291-
00000000-00000032.sys was 42KB of blank/null values, while the replacement file C-00000291-00000000-
00000.033.sys was 35KB and looked like a normal, if not obfuscated sys/.conf file?

Also, apparently CrowdStrike had at least 5 hours to work on the problem between the time it was discovered and the time it was fixed.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

I don't think the kernel could continue like that. The driver runs in kernel mode and took a null pointer exception. The kernel can't know how badly it's been screwed by that, the only feasible option is to BSOD.

The driver itself is where the error handling should take place. First off it ought to have static checks to prove it can't have trivial memory errors like this. Secondly, if a configuration file fails to load, it should make a determination about whether it's safe to continue or halt the system to prevent a potential exploit. You know, instead of shitting its pants and letting Windows handle it.